Trying to change kernel thru grub boot but my arrow keys broken

[filo]

Hi there welcome to the forum.
Maybe something like this?

How do you set a kernel to default

Defining a new default kernel has some known bugs with btrfs (if you search in the forum you'll find several topics about it). So, you should edit /etc/default/grub and change GRUB_DEFAULT=0 (which is the first line you see in the GRUB main menu, numbering starts from 0 in GRUB) to e.g. GRUB_DEFAULT=1 (second line in GRUB main menu) or whatever else. If you need to select an entry into a "sub-menu" you can use e.g. GRUB_DEFAULT="1>2" which means go into the submenu in line 2 of the main GRUB me…

And maybe consider also this

New Grub option GRUB_TOP_LEVEL

The latest grub update introduces a new feature, to explicitly select an entry of the installation (among linux, linux-lts, linux-zen, etc.) being at the top level of the menu. In case you use submenus, the selected entry is the one in the front/main page, while it is also at the top in the Advanced menu entries page. A user may wish to use an image that is not sorted as the “latest” version as the top-level entry. For example, in Arch Linux, if a user has the LTS and regular kernels installed…